Published: Thursday, February 14, 2013 at 04:36 PM.

Cutting back drastically on the number of snapper not only will hurt the charter fleet, but also the restaurants, motels, tackle shops and many aspects of the community that have come to depend on deep-sea fishing.

We have been told that if we pile straw on a camel at a point one more straw will break its back. If you are in the charter boat business, that last straw may be applied this year.

There seem to be several proposals for the snapper season this year. One is a 27-day snapper season in which a fisherman can catch two red snapper per day. If you don’t like that, there is a deluxe season proposed in which we would be allowed to fish for 40-something days and can catch one snapper per day.

Many people are scratching their heads wondering how the federal government came up with either of these scenarios. Two snappers a day for 27 days or one a day for 40-something days aren’t much of a choice.

Who can make boat payments, much less pay for dockage, insurance, fuel, a deckhand, ice and bait, reel and motor and boat repair and tackle and stay in business under either proposal?

I know there are other fish in the Gulf to catch, and head boats and charter boats have been grinding out the seasons trying to stay in business catching them while throwing back red snapper.

No one can seem to get a straight answer on why it is being done this way. I have heard that the government wants to bring back the snapper population to the levels of the 1950s. It has been said we should go back to where most red snapper weighed 20 pounds or more.

There were plenty of red snapper in the 1950s, but I can’t remember catching one of 20 or more pounds. There never were as many or as large red snapper in the 1950s as there are now.

It is true that as fishermen learned to use electronics and more and more fishermen came on the scene the snapper population decreased to the point it almost collapsed. The government stepped in and for the first time limits were put on almost all fish. First came a seven-red snapper limit. Then four snapper per fishermen and finally a two-snapper limit and all the while a size limit of 16 inches.

After several years the snapper population was as healthy as most fishermen had ever seen it and today it is as good as it ever has been. They are so thick out there now you can’t stir them with a stick.

Our reefs can only sustain so many fish, however. Once they reach the breaking point and all the bait on the reef are eaten they move on. So you can see that no matter how hard regulators try, there will only be a certain amount of snapper in our waters because there only is so much bait to sustain them. It seems we have reached that point now.

It probably would help the red snapper population to harvest some of the larger fish to make way for younger ones. Like a freshwater pond that contains only a few 10-pound bass that are caught over and over and released, everyone thinks it is healthy until the pond is drained and they discover only a few big bass and no little ones.

If we refuse to take any red snapper, the Gulf will get like this pond with a lot of large snappers and no small ones.

The one thing we have now that we didn’t have in the 1950s is more reefs. With the preponderance of artificial reefs we have hundreds of places to fish for snapper that we did not have years ago. It is true that we cannot go wild and fish like we did then keeping everything we caught.

We could have about 50 days of snapper fishing, keeping say two or three snapper per person. Using common sense methods we then could see where we stood with the fish population after the season ended. The way it is being done now makes little sense.

Cutting back drastically on the number of snapper not only will hurt the charter fleet, but also the restaurants, motels, tackle shops and many aspects of the community that have come to depend on deep-sea fishing.